Update: A zoomed look at the broken hockey stick

Steve McIntyre published an update tonight showing the last 200 years of the Yamal tree ring data versus the archived CRU tree ring data used to make the famous hockey stick. For those just joining us, see the story here.

First here’s the before an after at millennial scale.

Steve McIntyre writes:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

Here is a comparison of the Briffa chronology of the spaghetti graphs (red) versus the “SChweingruber” variation i.e. using russ035w instead of 12 recent of 252 CRU cores, leaving 240 unchanged. (The red curve here is the archived CRU chronology, which varies slightly from my emulation of the RCS chronology.)

148 thoughts on “Update: A zoomed look at the broken hockey stick”

So ten trees, picked for reasons politic not scientific, have sustained the belief in the hockey stick by the mass of climatologists, opinion makers, and politicians, and have facilitated them in foist a monstrous fraud on the world for the last decade.

Utterly breathtaking.

I propose a Museum to Human Folly and an expedition to find those ten trees and exhibit them in the main hall.
=====================================

so that is 12 more reasons to believe that the alarmist extremes of AGW is a fraud, rather than a mere mistake. This suggests that the AGW alarmism is based upon deliberate falsehood rather than just poor, but innocent, methodology.

What is Anthony’s take on this? I know that Anthony does believe that AGW is not a fraud and that there is a school of belief that AGW is real, but far less dramatic than the alarmist’s would have us believe. Where does this latest revelation leave us? Big Picture I mean?

looks like a stacked jury. I will say this. Tom P wins the Michael Mann award for excellence in statistics.

Seriously, Everybody should be aware that Steve’s work doesn’t break the hockey stick. It’s in the statistical penalty box. Simply, you can’t say that the MWP was warmer or colder than the present. The upshot os Steve’s work is this: we don’t know.

The big problem is this. Now that everybody knows which proxy’s show a strong MWP and those which do not, it’s virtually impossible to do a reconstruction except by randomly selecting proxies. Or selecting all proxies. Moreover, going forward you can expect more people to hold back samples from the archives. remember Briffa’s 12 samples were selected from a larger population and THAT population was not even archived.

It’s like this. They will now go out into the field and do 100 cores. They will examine those cores and only supply the data that confirms their hypothesis. When Steve McIntyre did his coring he followed the right proceedure. Take the cores, archive them all. Analysis is separate from proper data collection and archiving. You find a related difficulty in Kaufman 09, where the sediment series ( varves) are transformed and manipulated before they are archived. Always Always the raw data needs to be archived.
CRUTEMP anyone? lost the raw data.

In a dramatic acceleration of forecasts for global warming, UK scientists say the global average temperature could rise by 4C (7.2F) as early as 2060.

The Met Office study used projections of fossil fuel use that reflect the trend seen over the last 20 years.

Their computer models also factored in new findings on how carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans and forests.

The finding was presented at an Oxford University conference exploring the implications of a 4C rise.

The results show a “best estimate” of 4C being reached by 2070, with a possibility that it will come as early as 2060.

Richard Betts of the Met Office Hadley Centre described himself as “shocked” that so much warming could occur within the lifetimes of people alive today.

“If greenhouse gas emissions are not cut soon then we could see major climate changes within our own lifetimes,” he said.

“Four degrees of warming averaged over the globe translates into even greater warming in many regions, along with major changes in rainfall.”

Big burn

The model finds wide variations, with the Arctic possibly seeing a rise of up to 15C (27F) by the end of the century.

Western and southern parts of Africa could warm by up to 10C, with other land areas seeing a rise of 7C or more.

In its 2007 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the average warming by the end of the century would probably lie between 1.8C and 4C (3.2-7.2F), though it did not rule out the possibility of larger rises.

Key to the Met Office calculations was the use of projections showing fossil fuel use continuing to increase as it has done for the last couple of decades.

“Previously we haven’t looked at the impact of burning fossil fuels so intensely,” said Dr Betts.

“But it’s quite plausible we could get a rise of 4C by 2070 or even 2060.”

Dr Betts and his colleagues emphasise the uncertainties inherent in the modelling, particularly the role of the carbon cycle.

But he said he was confident the findings were significant and would serve as a useful guide to policymakers.

The presentation at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute came as negotiators from 192 countries were gathering in Bangkok for the latest set of prepatory talks in the run-up to December’s UN climate summit.

Major governments of developing and industrialised nations are committed to a deal that would keep the global temperature rise to 2C, which many regard as a threshold for “dangerous” climate change

I am as excited about this discovery as most others seem to be on this blog and on CA.

However, the astounding graphs we have seen so far represents “dimensionless chronology units” only. Not quite temperatures.

In that respect I can hardly wait to see the revised Mann et al. temperature proxy graphs when the Schweingruber data has been included. Only then will we be able to see the real impact of this discovery. And only if the impact is large enough will it get the proper attention in the media – hopefully before the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

As rbateman has high-lighted, it is all too easy to get lost in the scientific detail about the MWP & even the LIA. There is plenty of literature describing life in those periods, that clearly suggests they were periods when the Earth’s climate was different than that of today. I understand that evidence, scientific & literary, for both events has been discovered world wide.

Despite these wonderfully timed BS findings, (Bureaucratic Science – you know, it produces the desired result on time just when the politicos need it, unlike real science), with rises of 4°C temp, has there been any AGW signal found in the Troposphere above the tropics, which is where both sides of the non-debate seem to agree the signal should be found?

BTW you colonials are lucky, on our Sunday morning BBC 1 politics show we had the delights of one John Prescott (a well known Marxist Socialist former Labour Party Leader nicknamed two Jags, two shags, – due to his love of luxury gas guzzlers & extra marital activity) who is now the UK’s Climate Tzar, jetting around the globe telling everyone how they must reduce their carbon emissions to give the “kids a future”, all on his 6 figure taxpayer funded salary + generous expenses – well he is saving the world afterall! Then again you do have Al Gore.

I am shocked with the treering story.
Congratulations for everyone involved and for those that helped to spread the news.
But what now ?
Will there be a reaction of e.g. the IPCC ? I think it would be very important that the official warming propagandists react on this. Is there a task at the side of the serious scientific bloggers to provoke such a reaction ?
As far as I can judge the sceptics have now an argument to build on in a discussion with the believers.
It would be very interesting to see how heavy the other side measures this argument.

So far, the IPCC, the met office, in short, all the institutions that predict climate have been wrong about the last 10 years, from their models prior to the last 10 years. (Hansen et al) . That is a sufficiently long enough period (20 years) to doubt the veracity of their long range predictions, if th eclimate goes the opposite way to the models. If they erased the c02 signal, or at least downplayed it by a factor of 100, then they might have been right, although the alarmism and impending doom (note: The catastrophe is always impending and never real) would also have been eradicated.

Back to the issue: Tree rings at best give a blurry picture of past proxies. It would be better to consult arboriculturalists about trees than dendrclimatologists, and thats why scientists in the field of past proxies, both pre and post IPCC use sediment cores, peat bogs, and other such forensic investigation to obtain a better picture of past climates.

Steven Mosher
“Seriously, Everybody should be aware that Steve’s work doesn’t break the hockey stick. It’s in the statistical penalty box. Simply, you can’t say that the MWP was warmer or colder than the present. The upshot os Steve’s work is this: we don’t know.”

Well, hang on there. If the hockey stick and all its associated tomfoolery is broken, then we revert to the state of knowledge before the abominable stickmann came along, as represented by the graph in the IPCC 1 report, showing a strong MWP. This graph represented the consensus until the early 90s, based on a whole load of other evidence. In the absence of Mann’s stick and all its little sticklets, I would tend to believe that evidence.

Ken Hall, the big picture is that dendroclimatology is bunk. This has the consequence that paleoclimate reconstructions of the past 2000 years are more or less bunk. The borehole data is good enough to confirm the little ice age, but we can say little or nothing about temperatures before 1600. Hence claims of unprecedented temperatures over the last two millennia are bunk. How much credence you put in historical records of the medieval warm period is a matter of taste.

As usual Steve McIntyre is being extremely cautious in his own interpretations, but that’s the obvious interpretation.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole of AGW is bunk. That’s a longer and more complex argument. Personally I’m a lukewarmer, but opinions vary.

steven mosher (00:45:06) :
For we engineers these are just standard practice.

This must surely be the case for all practical based professions. Taking it a stage further; I wonder how far all this would have got if this was a murder trial. The case would surely have been thrown out because of tampered evidence, lack of evidence, withholding of evidence, inadmissible evidence and large amounts of conjecture and ‘leading the witness’.

So, how many schoolbooks need to be replaced?
With recycled paper of course!!

in meteorologie, climatologie and geographie i dont know any school book, whichs shows graphes of m. mann or like that. von storch called the graph “nosnsens”
every schoolar literature shows the mwp and the lia and i hope, that will never change.

“It’s like this. They will now go out into the field and do 100 cores. They will examine those cores and only supply the data that confirms their hypothesis. When Steve McIntyre did his coring he followed the right proceedure. Take the cores, archive them all. Analysis is separate from proper data collection and archiving. You find a related difficulty in Kaufman 09, where the sediment series ( varves) are transformed and manipulated before they are archived. Always Always the raw data needs to be archived.”

To me, the most disturbing aspect of this whole incident is the fact that it took *** years *** to finally pry the data away from Briffa et al. (data which should have been archived in a timely manner and available to all).

Unfortunately, there will be no consequences for these researchers; they will continue to publish whatever they want (thanks to their buddies on the review panels for the major climate science journals), and their taxpayer-funded climate “science” projects will still keep flowing in…

The Met Office predictions are now synonymous with epic failure. They couldn’t predict sunrise and sunset with any great accuracy, let alone weather. As for global warming, I’ve just resturned from walking my dog and I can tell you that warm the north western UK weather ain’t!

Autumn arrived a little early this year and is now in full swing. The weather’s cold, damp and miserable. I haven’t seen the sun for days because of the dreary grey overcast. Right now I could use a little global warming. Maybe I’ll print off a few of those nice graphs and set them ablaze…

At what point in proceedings does evidence migrate from being merely flawed to become misleading, and at what further point does any such misleading evidence drift into deliberate untruths, and from there who can hold the person(s) responsible as being either negligent or legally accountable?

$Billions have been spent / invested / squandered on the strength of the Hockey Stick. I remember the BBC’s ‘Climate Wars’ from a couple of years back, where a huge great billboard was driven throughout central London for TV.

The image? Why, the now hopelessly discredited (possibly worse than ‘discredited’) Hockey Stick.

1) Are they all from the same area in Russia?
1a) If they are all from the same area, how can one area be used to determine the entire earth’s temperature?
2) What were the tree rings of these trees used for, Mann’s 1st hockey stick, his 2nd stick, or some other stick?

However, I’m pessimistic that anyone will hear this. This monumental hoax is debunked and could save the world trillions of dollars and countless lives and resources….but all I expect to hear is the continued roar of chirping crickets. Statists have their fingers in their ears when it comes to discussion. They are only interested in dictation!

The stick is dead, long live the stick!

My optimistic half allows some glimmer of trust that the word will spread, that the truth will prevail. For the sake of my son and his future children…I hope that all this eco-foolishness is put to rest. Man(n)-caused cooling, warming, change…what utter hubris! [I love the “it’s cooling as a side effect of AGW”!]

I’ll allow that we should be responsible stewards of the bountiful Earth. Use it wisely rather than disuse it, misuse it, or abuse it. How clever of us to convert dead matter into useable energy! Hey…we can also do it with rocks, wind, sunshine, rushing water, tides, waves, and a long list of other resources.

The lane is very dirty
And my shoes are very thin.
I’ve got a little pocket
To put a penny in.
If you haven’t got a penny,
A ha’penny will do.
If you haven’t got a ha’penny,
May God Bless You.
==================

My wife was complaining this morning about two NPR gabfests she heard in the car, one on ‘climate change’ and Copenhagen, the other on windmills in the desert. In both the participants, including the hosts, all assumed that Global Warming (aka ‘climate change’) is an established fact, a problem that must be dealt with. At no point did anyone even raise the possibility that there might be a contrary view, or that the science was not entirely settled, that more CO2 might be beneficial, or that the evidence for recent ‘global warming’ might be shaky.

Of course that was NPR, but the same can be said for all of the media, aside from conservative talk radio and skeptical sites in the blogosphere, like this one. Nothing that is transpiring here or over on CA is even beginning to penetrate the consciousness of the political and media elites, not to mention the general public.

What can be done to penetrate this wall of silence, this stone foundation of ‘accepted fact’? Well, there’s one thing that will get the media’s attention:

Scandal.

I know that Anthony and most scientists are very reluctant to use the ‘F’ word, and understandably so. But given that ‘climate change’ is the banner for a massive political movement, which creates a huge impediment to anyone questioning the underlying science, maybe the only way to get crack the foundation is to hit it with the ‘F’ jackhammer.

The elite media won’t listen to a bunch of ragtag ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’ (as they are routinely disparaged and dismissed), but they will start paying attention if a few prominent scientists start charging ‘F____’. They will pay even more attention if a national society (like the AAAS) is forced to begin an investigation.

If scientists are caught cherry-picking only the data that supports (and dramatizes!) their hypotheses, and refusing to release all of the data for other other scientists to check, then that is prima facie evidence of misconduct. Scientific misconduct is a very serious charge. It is time for members of the relevant societies to start demanding public investigations.

Maybe we are not seeing the wood for the trees :-) If you read this new data as indicating that the temperature actually decreased over this period, then you are stuck trying to reconcile that theory with observations from satellite and other proxy data that clearly indicates a period of rapid warming towards the end of the last century. Surely the goal here is to discover what is happening, not to play “gotcha” on science that is already getting old… and there is a good chance that it will turn out to be close to accurate.. however flawed in conception. Lets play “do some original research and publish it” instead.

I’ve sent links to the original story to both of my Senators in Tennessee and to Senator Inhofe, who is the only skeptic voice in the Senate and on the Ernergy Committee. I advocate many of you do the same. It’s great if a bunch of us “interested people” know this stuff, but it’s a political issue, it needs politicains to get the story out.

I may be a bit niave, but some of them really will do the right thing – even if only to grab headlines… ;-)

i think we have some other, very good methods to find out, how warm the mwp on the northern hemisphere had been. in the greater alpine region (europe) eg. we know, that the tree limit in the mountains was about 2300m, today it is around 1900 to 2300m. we have glaciers proxis, which show a less glaciation between 1000 and 1400 in the alps. we have good proxis from central england (ipcc 1996 shown) and some more (indirect) proxis from china, usa, skandinavia and greenland. so in central europa it is very clear, that it was warmen than today, because trees don`t grow in levels over 2200m if it is not warm enougt there.
what about tree limit levels studies in moutains of skandinavia, russland, usa, china, japan etc.? a very easy and seriosly method to show past temperatures!?

Interesting that one of Mann’s initial “rebutes” of his hockey stick were words to the effect of “I never merged tree-ring data with thermometer data, and I never said that tree-ring data (temperature proxies from 1700 to 2000 years ago) should be merged with recent thermometer records.”…

But the IPCC’s AR4 (though not plotting his hockey stick directly – which did exactly that merging – repeats over and over again that tree-ring data IS one of their primary sources of temperature information over the past 2000 years. Earlier IPCC reports were at least honest enough to plot Mann’s data, not just use it in their words.

And, also in that AR4 report, the radiative “climate forcing” of CO2, Methane, NO2 and total greenhouse gasses are presented in THEIR full hockey stick glory.

—-

A second question arises: Since Mann’s tree ring data IS actually being merged with historical thermometer data, what temperature data did Mann (and Briffa!) actually use for recent temperatures?

Actual surface temperature warming since 1890 is between 1/2 of one degree and 7/10 of one degree – if UHI is removed from the record. Since 1950, surface temperature warming is less than 3/10 of one degree.

If the tree ring data is being (has been ??) “calibrated against a bad thermometer” because corrected global temperatures were used, (not actual temperatures of the actual trees – which are ALSO said to vary significantly from the atmospheric temperatures), were the estimated past temperature proxies off? How much were they “off” – if they are wrongly compared to recent temperatures that are themselves incorrect? If they were off, in what direction were they wrongly “corrected” when they were merged into the historical record?

I believe that what matters for the future is having a healthy “citizens’ science” that can counterbalance the temptations to corrupt that can open up as soon as one gets paid. I believe in the creative tension between “amateur” and “professional”, and that is truly the best of British. Even the warmist hype has arisen in part in a naive belief that it is individuals standing up to corrupt Big Oil and so forth – though here we know that that time has long since passed, if it ever existed.

Now that Ellie from Belfast has thoroughly opened my eyes to the level of degradation in the NASA GISS records (just the UK ones at that) I’m fired up and hoping to write up something that can kick-start another interactive project like Surface Stations, to rescue and sustain the real records. I’ve found evidence that pretty well every single GISS UK record that supposedly started in 1880 actually started earlier, and/or continues later than GISS shows, often is still extant. GISS UK looks so awful that I want to keep checking that I’ve really got my basic facts right about this, it seems too awful to be true.

I want to contact record-keepers right across the country. I want to develop a project that is positive and creative and interactive for people quite independently of the climate science issues, to reclaim the true original independent spirit of Science that of itself would have protected the data and prevented the current problems ever arising. The cooperation between amateurs and professionals that still exists in Astronomy and is close to the surface in Meteorology.

The best antidote to this is AGW hysteria,is Empiricism-that elegant result that was best
described by Mark Twain:”Once she sets on a hot stove,a cat will never sit on it again,but she will not set on a cold one, either..” When we hav ea very, cold nasty,winter,you will see a very slow backing away,surely,inexorably, even the moonbat
er,Monboits, of the world will,if not admit they were wrong,will at least scream “Ice Age!!” again…
Yet we foolishly convert food to fuel..

Must have been Oak trees. ACORNS are falling.
It requires a lot of vigilence to monitor experimental design.
They worry about dirty coal and use dirty sampling methods to create dirty Power Point Presentations.

I have to go with Steve Mosher on this one. I know we’re not supposed to think the worst of people on these blogs and SM would probaly snip me, but I can’t help believe that cherry picking will not start to happen in the field before archiving. The peer pressure (Is that what peer review has become?) to get the correct “AGW signal” is so intense now I can’t believe there is any independence in the establishment climate community.

Of course the FDA and the medical device and pharmaceuticals sectors long ago abandonned peer review as a sufficient condition for establishing quality. What is needed to restore the climate science to credibility is not only data audits like Steve McIntyre is doing but actual independent laboratory and field practice quality audits with registration and accreditation against an international laboratory practice standard. I just can’t believe their results anymore until indepenedent audits of their complete operation become the norm.

Anthony – What I don’t understand about this issue is why tree proxy data are being used to determine 20th century temperatures. I have followed your investigations with interest, so I know there is a lot of dispute about UHI, and Soviet versus post Soviet records.
Perhaps it is in order to maintain integrity with regard to the earlier condotions, which necessarily are only available in proxy form.
I would much appreciate clarification…

I have the same question as Mr. Fox. Why are we all worked up over a supposed global temperature spike (as interpreted using trees) during a time period when we have a better tool: a calibrated thermometer? All Mr. Mann has done is given the evil Gorebot fuel for his gigantic propaganda machine. Mr. Gore has been laughing all the way to the bank for the last 15 years. I really doubt that he gives a rat’s behind about AGW.

RR Kampen, have you not been paying attention? “They know and accept reality” as has been dictated by false scientific assumptions. Now who is in denial. I apologize if this totally upends your world view, but isn’t that what you wish upon the rest of us? The burden of proof is still on you.

Unfortunately their reality seems to have nothing to do with physical reality.

Overly high predictions by Hansen, 30, 20 and ten years ago, and cooling in the last decade show that. 30 years isn’t “weather”. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and so far we have jiggered charts instead of proof. And with each year the countering proofs of climate insensitivity to accumulate. The effect that alarmists scream of is apparently small enough to be swamped by the noise of weather.

The BBC has just announced that the Met Office predicts a “milder than average” winter for the UK. That’s pretty vague, of course, but, going by the accuracy of their last three summer forecasts it looks like it’s time to buy snow-tyres.

“RR Kampen, have you not been paying attention? “They know and accept reality” as has been dictated by false scientific assumptions. Now who is in denial. I apologize if this totally upends your world view, but isn’t that what you wish upon the rest of us? The burden of proof is still on you.”
—

Proof of what? What kind of proof: mathematical proof derived from empirical evidence?

What I wish ‘upon the rest of you’ is integrity and wisdom. Also a minimum of respect for those who something about the subject of climatology – e.g. a projection of own ingnorance onto those people is not done.

A very realistic piece of Krugman’s, except I doubt his action strategy. Dropping CO2 emissions will not work during our lives. So forget Kyoto and emission trades. Anticipate on the vast consequences GW is going to have. Are you now going to tell me that it is more realistic to expect cooling (like Svensmark, who in the same paragraph admits climate cannot be predicted at all thus making rather a fool of himself), or simply continued warming given the physics and facts around CO2?

O well, if thermal records and the freezing point of water can’t be trusted, I can only rely on my own eyes. They see the changes in Holland, where I lost one of my prime hobbies: skating on canals and lakes. The saw the desertification of Australian fringe areas, the fantastic erosion of Alpine and Norwegian glaciers. How unfortunate I should have only visited or lived in the areas where it gets warmer.

…you can see sets of tree ring records chosen according to the following criteria.
* End date toward the end of the 20th century to include the late century warming.
* Start date before 1600 to include the “little ice age”.
* Trees from both northern and southern hemispheres.
What is interesting is that both northern and southern records show the warming from 1910 to 1950 but only the southern ones show an increase from 1975 onwards.

Could it be that the early 20th century warning was genuine but that much of the lat 20th warming was an artifact of the urban heat island effect?

“RR Kampen>> I’m sorry you lost your favourite hobby, but… You do know that climate changes, sort of, all the time..?”

—

Sure, and just like now such changes had causes, many of which are identifiable.

We’re dealing with the fastest and largest climate change in millenia and you know what? The cause of this has been identified too, and has proved to be actually very simple. You put the kettle on the fire and average temperature of the water goes up. You trap some more heat in the atmosphere and average temperature of the air goes up.
I feel sorry too. I’d have preferred an ice age, even if that would have been as dramatic in its consequences.

Tree rings around the liars,
A pocket full of fires;
ashes, ashes
our cities burn down!

Seriously, my big fear is that the AGWarmists will merely look at the new graph and determine that unless we stop driving SUVs we’ll freeze. AGCoolists. Best for them, the dire consequences of global cooling are far more palpable. Lower sea levels strand cities and parch lowlands. Freezing and starving is a horrific death for the poor.

“Why is it a problem when the ‘tree temperature’ doesn’t match the instrumental record? Shouldn’t we just be using the instrumental record here anyway?”

This issue is that the entire point of a ‘tree proxy’ is the belief that a tree that meets certain criteria can be calibrated into a archiving thermometer.

You don’t -have- to use a meterstick to measure distance. You can use something else as a ‘proxy’ measuring device – because you (or someone) has calibrated it against a true meterstick at some point.

For all sorts of normal measuements, you’re able to find proxies that have a respectable precision. Odometers, maps, measuring tapes, paper – none of these things are “official.” But the calibration is close enough that no one (at least, no one but a scientist or engineer) really ever cares that you’re using a proxy.

Here, they’ve found a proxy for measuring temperature. Except – it can’t actually measure temperature in the recent past. The recent past being that area where we -do- have the best instrumental records, you would expect this region to have the -best- overlap with the proxy.

If it was slight differences between the temperature as determined by the proxy and the instrumental records, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Everyone would just say “Ok, we have more data now, let’s do a better calibration and get a better model for how our proxy works exactly.”

Going back to the analogy of metersticks-sold-at-retail as compared to the “official meterstick”, that would be like noticing that your wood is drying out and causing your stick to shrink an additional eighth of an inch. So your new plan would invoke a longer drying period before making the marks on the ruler.

Here, it is more like discovering your metersticks is made from living flubber. The fact that it happened to be exactly a meter long when you examined it previously doesn’t mean that it is a meter long now. Nor does it appear to mean it was ever a meter long previously.

All of which means: If you want to use this as a proxy, you need a much more solid model of how to calibrate your data. Because if your model doesn’t have precisely the same precision outside of the original calibration period, then you have nothing.

Outside of climate science, this sort of “proxy search” would invariable involve sequestering a full third of the overlap as an area on which to test the model.

Kampen, Anything you have “witnessed” was not a result of AGW, period.
If the AGW theory ends up coming to fruition the several degrees necessary for the effects to be observed will be happening when they increase actually happens.

The insignificant and meaningless 1 degree climate variation over the last half or full century are neither enough to cause what you have observed or a result of AGW.

…in many cases, the enhanced recruitment and small-range
adjustments experienced in the twentieth century
have not yet been of sufficient magnitude to compensate
for the range contraction during the LIA. Thus,
some areas that were forested or supported sparse trees
during theMWPremain treeless at present. In effect, at
the Russian sites studied, the impact of twentieth
century warming has not yet compensated fully for the
mortality and range constriction caused by the cold
temperatures of the LIA. These results are similar to
observations in some other northern treeline regions
such as uplands in eastern Quebec and interior
Labrador where Picea mariana (P. Mill.) B. S. P. and
Picea glauca (Moench) Voss trees remain below their
pre-LIA limits despite recent warming (Gamache &
Payette 2005; Payette 2007).

Basically, the gist of this is that the treeline hasn’t gotten anywhere near where it has been at least twice in the (geologically) recent past. They politely offer some possible explanations, instead of impolitely suggesting that the long-term historical temperature record might be quite understating the warmth of the MWP and Holocene.

The long and the short of this is that we ought to be asking why folks are looking at tree rings which are ambiguous if we’re lucky, when they can be looking at tree growth which is rather straight forward?

Why indeed. It sure looks to me like we’ve got a helluva proxy at least for the northern hemisphere. My take away is that they are politely ignoring this work because it calls the temperature record into question, and implies that we’re not warming as much or as fast as others claim. I can’t think of a good way to refute this data, or conclusion either.

Don’t have a coronory! All people or saying is that there is now room for doubt about the supposed unprecendent warmth of the twentieth century. Why is that threatening to you? Surely it is common sense.

And your quip about the physics of CO2 is also a non sequitar, since nobody at all is suggesting that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Almost all agree that a doubling of CO2 levels would lead to a temperature rise of about 1.2C. Where there is disagreement is in the sign of feedbacks, especially water vapour feedback. The warmists consider only the Clausius-Clapeyron equation but ignore cloud dynamics. In their models, while absolute humidity increases with CO2 forcing, the cloud cover is supposed to remain the same. Absolutely ridiculous. Yet that is what their models are based upon.

“We’re dealing with the fastest and largest climate change in millenia and you know what? ”

You have a serious case of cognitive dissonance and you are in the “anger” stage. You cling to the myth that you saw in AIT, watching Gore ascending in the scissor lift to the top of the graph, but the evidence is turning to dust.

The hockey stick plays a secondary role at best in the argument for AGW.

There are two foundational tenets of AGW.

1. The instrumented record shows a warming ( from 1850 to present)
2. The addition of GHGs to the atmosphere is the best explanation of this.

For the present purposes let’s assume #1 is a given. ( as a early early backer of Surface stations, I do have issues with #1)

WRT #2. This is fundamental science: radiative physics.

The hockey stick comes into play when people try to argue that the current level of warming may be due to something other than #2 OR #2 plus natural variation. Hence, they point to the MWP and documentary evidence ( it was green in greenland) to support the contention that the warming we see is natural. The Hockey stick tries to counter this objection by estimating three things.
A. The estimated level of warming in DEGREES
B. The rate of warming
C. The localization of that warming.

Steve’s work shows this: The attempts to show that the MWP was cooler than today are statistically unsound. I agree with him. I also Agree with him when he says that his work allows us to conclude nothing about the actual level of warming in the MWP, the rate of warming, and it’s localization.

Now, If you did a reconstruction using proper methods and iff you believed in proxies and iff you showed that the MWP was:
A. warmer than the present with 95% confidence.
B. Had a high rate of onset
C. Was global.

THEN, you would have a good argument that the climate sensitivities estimated by the GCM might be off. The simple fact is that AGW alarmist made too much of the hockey stick. They over played that hand. Don’t over play yours.

Climate change? AGW? Of course there is climate change, as there has always been. The bunk part is the AGW, and that there is any way humans can have any effect on climate, warming or cooling. I liken it to a flea creeping up an elephant’s leg with rape on its mind.

I can’t determine if all this AGW nonsense is due to stupidity or cupidity, but I suspect it is a combination of both, with lots of “useful idiots” in the mix, as Joe Stalin called those in western countries who promoted communism.

Lucy Skywalker in a CA comment wrote: “Now this Hockey Stick hydra has three heads: Yamal, bristlecones, and CRU undisclosed records. My recent forays into the nearest reliable Arctic thermometer records from GISS and John Daly (at Jeff Id) all show thermometer records without any sign of the crucial sharp Hockey Stick upturn. I cannot believe CRU can show anything very different.”

She nailed it. Now the last standing wall of the IPCC and all the model work supposed to emulate the HADCRUT is left. Will Dr. Phil Jones finally let the raw data used to compile the HADCRUT be available to others so they can independently verify if HADCRUT is “robust”?

At this stage stonewalling doesn’t look good on Hadley Center, on Jones and in general on IPCC and the entire organizations and governments that are so happily condoning IPCC work.

My bet just as Lucy wrote, is that HADCRUT will be proven non robust and the entire IPCC Group I scientific montage will collapse, showing only the Groups II and III political face. I’d bet that our Chinese and Indian friends know already something about it…

“Now, If you did a reconstruction using proper methods and iff you believed in proxies and iff you showed that the MWP was:
A. warmer than the present with 95% confidence.
B. Had a high rate of onset
C. Was global.

THEN, you would have a good argument that the climate sensitivities estimated by the GCM might be off.”

Gorgeous rubbish.
It was warmer in the MWP as Greenland, Alpine glaciers and I think Himalayan glaciers show.
The rate of onset is mind-blowingly irrelevant though previous warmings have suggested 10s of degrees in decades.
Since more areas show the MWP than don’t we must assume it was globally significant.
But let’s get back to the real point.
The hypothesis of CO2 driven warming is unsupported by fact on every level and scale (apart from the lab. ).
The concept that anyone needs to jump through your hoops to disprove your absurd hypothesis shows a magnificent arrogance and an ignorance of logic.

The key piece of the hockeystick isn’t the blade, or even the comparison of the tip to the MWP really.

The key piece is how it scrubs the Little Ice Age from the historical record. “We’ve been hot before!” is a reasonable argument. But it has nothing to say about how much of the current warming might be anthropogenic.

But the argument “We’re in a cyclical rebound of approximately 1.5-to-2C/Century from the Little Ice Age.” was the prevailing scientific position as recently as 1998. There wasn’t a lot of room for the “A” of “AGW” in that case.

The ability to assign all of the warming to human activities is what opens the doors to the potentially apocalyptic effects by extrapolating exponentialities.

You are correct in your observation that getting the “word” out is a problem. What you stated for reasons are very true. Right now I would say the “Fox Network” is opening up more towards the right. The Internet is really the only source of info that shows the “Realists” side of AGW. Mr. Lynn, I would say that in regards to the statement the word isn’t getting out is not totally true. Check out this latest report I posted at GWH.com

This Senator is a breath of relief for the Realist cause. If you do your homework or check out GWH.com, you will find that quite a few good Climate Scientists are on “our” side…They are finding and posting new info all of the time….

Unless co2 is NOT a greenhouse gas at all and thefore has no affect at all on temperature oscillations, there is a fourth head to the hydra. That one is labelled ‘historic co2 readings’. These show tens of thousands of co2 readings back to 1830, many as high as today. They were turned over by Charles Keeling in 1957 and ignored by the IPCC.

So either co2 is not a primary driver-as evidenced by a constant 280ppm as temperature fluctuated wildly

OR

Co2 is a primary driver but levels in the atmosphere are currently nothing out of the ordinary compared to the historic record since 1830.

At this stage stonewalling doesn’t look good on Hadley Center, on Jones and in general on IPCC and the entire organizations and governments that are so happily condoning IPCC work.

I’m afraid you’re preaching to the converted. The Politicians listen to the Scientists; they can do little else. Scientific paradigm changing takes a lot longer than a few electoral cycles. They’ve shown disdain for public opinion in other areas, so I don’t see why they should pay any attention to this. I believe the battle is largely lost unless and until we start writing and calling our politicians, with articulate and accurate counter-arguments, such as those put forward by SM and this blog. I doubt those who form policy have as much time to read blogs as they do for the arguments of “expert” environmental lobbyists.

But in any case, apart from the obvious destruction of public trust in the integrity of the scientific process, the argument will just quietly move on somewhere else. The end result will be the same: taxes!

“1. The instrumented record shows a warming ( from 1850 to present)
2. The addition of GHGs to the atmosphere is the best explanation of this.

For the present purposes let’s assume #1 is a given. ( as a early early backer of Surface stations, I do have issues with #1)

WRT #2. This is fundamental science: radiative physics.”

It is only the best explanation when the assumption is made that the climate of the Holocene was predominately stable. If we allow that the historical warm periods and cool periods did actually happen, then it follows that the twentieth century is a natural recovery from the little ice age, and still not yet equal to the MWP.

Warmists keep on about radiative physics, as if waving these magic words in the air somehow constitutes evidence. But what does radiative physics actually tell us? Well, if we ignore feedbacks a simple calculation will suffice for an increase in CO2 from 280 to 390 ppm.
Let the forcing F = 5.35Ln(390/280)
= 1.8 W/M^-2.
Using Stefan-Boltzman equation F = sigma * T^4 and assuming the average insolation is 230 W/M^-2 without this forcing and 231.8 with the forcing.
Then 231.8/230 = [Tnew/Told]^4
Then Tnew = Told * 1.0019 = 288 * 1.0019 = 288.56.
There you have about half a degree in a century, which is less than the observed maximum of 0.75 degrees.
Of course, if you include feedbacks you get a different result, but we can’t even be sure of the sign of the net feedback. Several scientists, including Lindzen, Spencer, Christy and Eschenbach, believe that the feedback is actually negative. The point is, you can’t wave your hand and shout “radiation physics” because we just don’t know enough.

“Now, If you did a reconstruction using proper methods and iff you believed in proxies and iff you showed that the MWP was:
A. warmer than the present with 95% confidence.
B. Had a high rate of onset
C. Was global.

THEN, you would have a good argument that the climate sensitivities estimated by the GCM might be off.
”

Why does the MWP have to be warmer than present? Even if it was only as warm as present then it would remove the mantra that the twentieth century warming was unprecendent. Warmists are also fond of wagging their fingers at so called rapid rates. But what evidence is there that rates of temperature change in the twentieth century were any more rapid than at other times?

There is plenty of evidence that the MWP was both real and global. See herehttp://www.livinginperu.com/prueba/qubo.php
where researchers have uncovered evidence that the Inca civilization benefited from warm climate during the medieval period.

Let me put the question the other way round:
Iff you can show that the climate of the last thousand years was unchanging, and iff you can show a positive radiative imbalance of 1.8 W/M^2 and iff you can show the stratosphere cooling when the lower troposphere is warming, then you would have a good argument for AGW.

Sorry, I view your glacier data and greenland data with the same scepticism that I view tree rings. GHGs warm the planet, how much is the operative question, how fast is the operative question. ( Psst I’m one of the orginal lukewarmers) Please don’t pester the thread with anecdotes. If you have a reconstruction of greenland temperatures or of himalayian temps or of anything we’d be glad to audit it over at CA. Until then you haven’t freed your data, you havent freed your code and what you claim isn’t science. Just like HADCRU. I wish people would get that these arguments cut two ways.

RR Kampen said: “The cause of this has been identified too, and has proved to be actually very simple.”

It is a simple message, to appeal to the simple minded. But the overall physics of radiative forcings and feedbacks is anything but simple. If it were, there would be no debate. That you believe this topic is “simple” tells me you do not understand it.

Steve McIntryre’s reconstructions above are based on adding an established dataset, the Schweingruber Yamal sample instead of the “12 trees used in the CRU archive”. Steve has given no justification for removing these 12 trees. In fact they probably predate Briffa’s CRU analysis, being in the original Russian dataset established by Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002.

One of Steve’s major complaint about the CRU dataset was that it used few recent trees, hence the need to add the Schweingruber series. It was therefore rather strange that towards the end of the reconstruction the 12 living trees were excluded only to be replaced by 9 trees with earlier end dates.

I asked Steve what the chronology would look like if these twelve trees were merged back in, but no plot was forthcoming. So I downloaded R, his favoured statistical package, and tweaked Steve’s published code to include the twelve trees back in myself. Below is the chronology I posted on ClimateAudit a few hours ago.

The red line is the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive; black is the chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample and the complete CRU archive. Both plots are smoothed with 21-year gaussian, as before. The y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1.

It looks like the Yamal reconstruction published by Briffa is rather insensitive to the inclusion of the additional data. There is no broken hockeystick.

“It is good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”

(Konrad Lorenz)

Must be some premature ageing in climatology then!

—

Alan the Brit (03:23:39) :

“BTW you colonials are lucky, on our Sunday morning BBC 1 politics show we had the delights of one John Prescott (a well known Marxist Socialist former Labour Party Leader nicknamed two Jags, two shags, – due to his love of luxury gas guzzlers & extra marital activity) who is now the UK’s Climate Tzar, jetting around the globe telling everyone how they must reduce their carbon emissions to give the “kids a future”, all on his 6 figure taxpayer funded salary + generous expenses – well he is saving the world afterall!”

Are you perhaps referring to the Vogon Commander ‘Presthotic Two-Jags’?
He did state that it’s about ‘carbon rationing’ though. Him and his goons want to ration the substance of life!

Kim says: “I propose a Museum to Human Folly and an expedition to find those ten trees and exhibit them in the main hall.”

How about a Surfacestations.org expedition to see if any of these trees are downwind of campfire pits, cabins, have abnormally fertile soil, or were exposed to more sunlight in the 20th century due to clearing or other effects?

When you consider the human lives at stake by ‘carbon’ cap imposed energy shortages, from starvation, freezing, failing to develop new technologies etc., is this not a *criminal act* by the hockey stickians?

“The UK should take active steps to prepare for dangerous climate change of perhaps 4C according to one of the government’s chief scientific advisers. In policy areas such as flood protection, agriculture and coastal erosion Professor Bob Watson said the country should plan for the effects of a 4C global average rise on pre-industrial levels.”

When asked in 1997 at Kyoto, as the new IPCC Chairman, about the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, Watson responded by denigrating all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. “The science is settled” he said, and “we’re not going to reopen it here.”http://sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm

Clearly many posters are sending posts to Real Climate and Tamino’s Open Mind blogs on this topic. However, to date they are maintaining a dignified silence and not accepting posts that do not suit their position.

Any of you who find that your posts to those sites are being rejected (as usual without any explanation) can keep a copy of the post, and post it at http://rcrejects.wordpress.com if you want.

rcrejects is a repository for posts rejected at other climate sites. It has been operating since early this year, and has many examples of rejected posts by now.

I haven’t decided yet whether I want to dignify the CRU selection of 12 cores by using this data to dilute the results from population averages (e.g. russ035w). At this point, I’m inclined to think that the calculation using russ035w without the 12 special picks is a more defensible sampling procedure and that a “compromise” merged set is still acquiescing in an undocumented and suspect picking process, albeit diluted by information from an actual population, and am reluctant to appear to give any perceived endorsement of such a “compromise”. I’ll think about it, but there’s lots on my plate right now.

If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled. The fact that mixing a biased sample in with a random sample tends to bias you back toward that sample is essentially a tautology.

“If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled.”

No, they are the twelve most recent cores. There’s been no evidence provided to suggest they are in any way suspect. Indeed Steve McIntyre said they may well have been just the most recent part of Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s dataset and no selection would have been made. There is no obvious reason to exclude them.

I would be interested to hear a response from Steve – it’s gone very quiet over at CA.

You are acting as though there is some form of “smoking” gun associated with your graph including the 12 most recent cores to ascribe a motive for NOT including them. Obviously their inclusion generates almost all of the original author’s “signal”. If that was your only point, no wonder you haven’t had a reply.

I think it would be more reasonable if it said “explain, resign, or be fired”.

Incidentally, are these people paid for by the British government, that same entity that does business in California and defrauds people out of global warming taxes every time we buy airline tickets to travel to and from the UK ??

Tom: I will have to concede that I am not familiar with the methodology used in sampling these cores, and I am not familiar enough with the programming language you are using to figure out how you are treating the data. I am confused that you appear to be adding in a much smaller sample, yet it is driving your result. If you would choose to enlighten me on any of these points, I would appreciate it.

Your approach doesn’t make much sense. If the majority of trees in the region don’t calibrate well to temperature, then it would seem reasonable to leave the 12 out.

The much larger data set says the opposite. If this were a business problem and you were trying to gauge the market for a product via survey results and you asked 100 people whether they like the product or not. 88 say they do and would buy again, but 12 say they don’t what would be the end result?

Seems simple enough.

Do you then conclude the product is worthless because of the 12 that don’t like the product and send a recommendation back to management that the product should be pulled, but not showing them the other data? Would that be reasonable?

Would you tell the management then that 100% of the data says “people don’t like the product”?

That’s the scenario we have with Briffa’s tree data as it was applied by the scientific scoundrels at Hadley CRU.

No amount of statistical analysis will change the fact that the majority of data was not only excluded, but hidden from the public for a long time and then kept hidden even after repeated requests.

You must be unbelievably dense to miss this fact, or you are part of the CRU just trying to smooth over this sleight of hand perpetrated by people in positions of trust.

[3] Produce a new study using “new data” that conclusively proves the unprecendented warming of the 20th/21st Centuries and withhold the data for the next few years…. providing another window of opportunity for Political Actions

[4] Claim that the debunkers are “Cherry Picking the Data”…

[5] Claim that the rest of the Yamal data that doesn’t have a hockey stick shape is corrupted by non-CO2 signals….

[6] Claim that the debunkers are being mean, and are spoiling the AGW Alarmist Party…

This Senator is a breath of relief for the Realist cause. If you do your homework or check out GWH.com, you will find that quite a few good Climate Scientists are on “our” side…They are finding and posting new info all of the time….

I am delighted to see that the admirable Senator Inhofe is going to lead a Truth Squad to Copenhagen to challenge the Alarmists. I hope he can convince some big names to accompany him—maybe Lindzen?

Perhaps he could set up a podium somewhere nearby and challenge the Alarmists to a debate. Conduct the debate with empty chairs, if necessary. It might interest the press enough to get some coverage.

But the need for such theater points up the sad fact that the elite media, the academic and institutional scientists, and the political leadership of the West, are completely in thrall to the Alarmists. That has to change, if Realists are to make any headway. Maybe this scandal will help (I notice that The Register is using the word ‘scandal’).

If any of you here are members of professional societies to which the Mannish miscreants belong, now is the time to call for Boards of Inquiry for possible misconduct.

I am online too much, but I am not online 24/7. I’ve been out playing squash. Surely I’m allowed to be offline occasionally without a poster commenting adversely on this.
While I was out, CA crashed as well. Thus, it was “quiet.

Contrary to Tom’s speculations and misrepresentation of my statements, it is my opinion that there is considerable evidence that the 12 cores are not a complete population i.e. that they have been picked form a larger population. Rather than quote form actual text, Tom puts the following words in my mouth that I did not say:

Steve McIntyre said they may well have been just the most recent part of Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s dataset and no selection would have been made.

This is not my view.

The balance of Tom’s argument is:

No, they are the twelve most recent cores. There’s been no evidence provided to suggest they are in any way suspect. ..There is no obvious reason to exclude them.

I disagree. I do not believe that they constitute a complete population of recent cores. As a result, I believe that the archive is suspect. There is every reason to exclude them in order to carry out a sensitivity as I did. The sensitivity study showed very different results. I do not suggest that the sensitivity run be used as an alternative temperature history. Right now, there are far too many questions attached to this data set to propose any solution to the sampling conundrum. It’s only been a couple of days since the lamentable size of the CRU sample became known and it will take a little more time yet to assess things.

Reasons why I “suspect” that a selection was made from a larger population include the following. A field dendro could take 12 cores in an hour. We took a lot more than that at Mt Allegre and a field dendro could be far more efficient. Thus, it seems very unlikely that the entire population of cores from the Yamal program is only 12 cores and on this basis, it is my surmise that a selection was taken from the cores. Standard dendro procedures use all crossdated cores and definitely use more than 10 cores if they are available.

This doesn’t “prove” that a selection was made, but it is reasonable to “suspect” that a selection was made and to ask CRU and their Russian associates to provide a clear statement of their protocols. There’s no urgency to do anything prior to receiving a statement of their sampling protocols. For this purpose, it doesn’t matter a whit whether the selection was made by the Russians or at CRU or a combination. In my first post on this matter – which Tom appears not to have read, I canvass the limited evidence for and against. There is certainly evidence supporting the idea that the 12 cores were among 17 selected by the Russians, but in other parts of the data set, the CRU population is larger than that used in the Hantemirov and Shiyatov chronology. The construction of the CRU data set is not described in any literature; the description in Hantemirov and Shiyatov has something to do with it, but doesn’t yield the CRU data data set. Some sort of reconciliation is required.

In addition, the age distribution of the CRU 12 is very different than the age distribution from the nearby Schweingruber population. In my opinion, the uniformly high age of the CRU12 relative to the Schweingruber population is suggestive of selection – in this respect, perhaps and even probably by the Russians. Again this isnt proof. Maybe they were just lucky 12 straight times and, unlike Schweingruber, they got very long-lived trees with every core. Without documentaiton, no one knows. In any event, this doesn’t help the Briffa situation. If these things are temperature proxies, the results from two different nearby populations should not be so different and protocols need to be established for ensuring that the age distribution of the modern sample is relatively homogeneous with the subfossil samples (and they aren’t.)

The prevailing dendro view is that an RCS chronology requires a much larger population than a “conventional” standardization. Thus, even if the data set had been winnowed down to 10 cores in 1990 and 5 cores at the end, this is an absurdly low population for modern cores, which are relatively easily obtained. Use of such small replication is inconsistent with Briffa’s own methodological statements.

Tom also misses a hugely important context. There is a nearby site (Polar Urals) with an ample supply of modern core. Indeed, at one time, Briffa used Polar Urals to represent this region. My original question was whether there was a valid reason for substituting Yamal for Polar Urals. The microscopic size of the modern record suggests that there was not a valid reason. However, this tiny sample size was not known to third parties until recently due to Briffa’s withholding of data, not just from me, but also to D’Arrigo, Wilson et al.

Until details of the Yamal selection process are known, my sense right now is that one cannot blindly assume – as Tom does – that what we see is a population. Maybe this will prove to be the case, but personally I rather doubt it. A better approach is to use the Polar Urals data set as a building block.

As to Tom’s argument that none of this “matters”, the Yamal data set has a bristlecone-like function in a number of reconstructions. While the differences between the versions may not seem like a lot to Tom, as someone with considerable experience with this data, it is my opinion that the revisions will have a material impact on the medieval-modern difference in the multiproxy studies that do not depend on strip bark bristlecones.

Jeff shows that Tom continued the “combined” graphic past the point where Schweingruber data ends (1990). The elevated values in Tom’s “combined” data arise because he is using the very data in question for that portion. That portion is very similar to that derived from Briffa data because it is only derived from Briffa data.

I’m sorry Jeff but I will be hard on Tom P. This was a beginner error.
Tom, I’ll keep it simple.

You present the data at the end of the series AS IF it were the briffa + Schweingruber series. Its not. Schweingruber variation ( the addition trees)
ENDS in 1990. after 1990 you only have the briffa 1dozen which actually shrinks to 5 trees by the end.

Now, that’s a hell of note to wake up to.

Tom when working with tree ring series the first rule is check the begining date and the end date.

There are 252 distinct series in the CRU archive. There are 12 IDs consisting of a 3-letter prefix, a 2-digit tree # and 1-digit core#. All 12 end in 1988 or later and presumably come from the living tree samples. The nomenclature of these core IDs url (POR01…POR11; YAD04…YAD12; JAH14…JAH16 – excluding the last digit of the ID here as it is a core #) suggests to me that there were at least 11 POR cores, 12 YAD cores and 16 JAH cores.

It is “possible” that they skipped ID numbers, but this is a farfetched theory even for Tom. As surmised here, the missing ID numbers are “evidence” of at least 39 cores and that the present archive is not only too small, but incomplete.

I need to look at the lettering of the cores tomorrow. I bet we can estimate the number of true cores pre-sorting. I could add a bunch of Arima proxies of the same qty and value, sort them for the same signal as Briffa Yamal and throw them away then average Briffa Yamal with the rest. That would give us an idea of the true series.

“However, his result is exactly the same as SteveM presented already.”

No it isn’t. I presented the entire chronology from the combined dataset – Steve truncated his early. Of course this means the most recent cores are from CRU archive as the Schweingruber cores end in 1991.

My intent was to show the effect of adding in the Schweingruber cores to the entire CRU dataset. Steve might want to take issue with the CRU cores as a whole in terms of their selection, but that is not a basis for excluding part of a dataset.

[quote]
1. The instrumented record shows a warming ( from 1850 to present)
2. The addition of GHGs to the atmosphere is the best explanation of this.
…
WRT #2. This is fundamental science: radiative physics.
[/quote]
That last statement is far too strong. It is only true that it is fundamental science that adding GHGs to the atmosphere will have some non-zero effect on temperature. That is saying a great deal less than your #2 above. There are far too many unknowns involved in the climate, both in measurement and mechanisms, for us to limit ourselves to GHGs as the only possible explanation. Accordingly, I reject your #2.

[quote]
Steve’s work shows this: The attempts to show that the MWP was cooler than today are statistically unsound. I agree with him. I also Agree with him when he says that his work allows us to conclude nothing about the actual level of warming in the MWP, the rate of warming, and it’s localization.
[/quote]
Steve, as ever, is properly precise, and I agree with you both.

[quote]
Now, If you did a reconstruction using proper methods … [ several very sensible conditions ] … THEN, you would have a good argument that the climate sensitivities estimated by the GCM might be off.
[/quote]
While I agree with all of this, I disagree with the implicit assumption that this is the only route to a good argument against the climate sensitivities assumed by the GCMs.
The point of my original post was that these proxy games are _not_ the only evidence for the existence of the MWP. Steve’s work has shown that their contribution is somewhere from highly dubious to outright useless.
It is possible that something useful based on these proxies might come along in the future, but, until then, it seems rational to ignore them and rely on the evidence available before the hockey stick started muddying the waters.
That evidence is as shown in the chart in IPCC AR1 – I think, based on Lamb’s work in the 1960s ? – which shows global temperatures following a cycle with a period of 5 or 600 years, in which we happen to be in an upswing over the last century or so. In particular, it shows absolutely nothing unusual about the warming of the last few decades, either in amount or in rate of warming.
So, in the absence of any credible new evidence, I will continue to believe in the long slow cycles, and that there is nothing unusual about recent warming. Accordingly, for now, I continue to reject the hypothesis that anthropogenic CO2 has had any significant effect. If you want to persuade me otherwise, please try harder.

One point on the GCMs : I note that you say ” the climate sensitivities estimated by the GCM”, implying that the sensitivities are an OUTput of the GCMs.
You will note that I say ” the climate sensitivities assumed by the GCMs”, reflecting my understanding that climate sensitivity is an INput to the GCMs.
Am I wrong ?

Kampen, Anything you have “witnessed” was not a result of AGW, period.
If the AGW theory ends up coming to fruition the several degrees necessary for the effects to be observed will be happening when they increase actually happens.

The insignificant and meaningless 1 degree climate variation over the last half or full century are neither enough to cause what you have observed or a result of AGW.

Stop being such a willing fool.”

—

Steve, what then melts the ice? Freezing point of water has dropped? Elves of ‘Mother Nature’?
Please refrain from remarks like that ‘willing fool’. Please show some integrity, wisdom, respect for those who really know something about climate and please, please keep to the subject. ‘Willing fools’ are no subject of AGW-discussions, unless they are hypothesized to bring down the freezing point of water or things like that.

The (estimated) increase in global temperature between 1890 and 2009 is (at most!) 3/4 of one degree. And the actual increase – if “uncorrupted” data freed of GISS and HADCRU corruption (er, corrections) are removed, apparently nature has seen less than 1/2 of ONE degree increase in 120 years …

For any of the “assumed” secondary proofs of AGW that are so often claimed, you MUST show that the “frequently claimed” observed behaivor (melting glaciers, increase in droughts, increase in floods, increase in hurricanes, increase in sea level, increase in seal level rise rate, loss of Arctic ice extents, increase in malaria, decrease in polar bear populations, increase in specie extinction, etc, etc, etc, etc ….

1) Actually is occuring – and is not merely an exaggerated propaganda piece by those desperate to get more of the 79 billion in AGW funding. For example, polar bear populations are increasing, and they are NOT threatened by a change in temperatures. Antarctic ice extents are increasing, no decreasing. There is NO observed albedo effect in the Arctic, where sea ice extent in one year is NOT realted to subsequent heating, cooling, or sea ice extent the following year. It simply has NOT happened, and so cannot be a part of theories REQUIRING a positive albedo effect to exaggerate global warming.

2) actually DID cause the assumed effect. (For example, an increase in temperature did NOT change the sea ice extent in 2007 – because temperatures did NOT change between 2006 – 2007 – 2008 – 2009, but a change in winds in 2007 DID occur. Loss of Kilamanjaro’s glaciers DID occur, but because of long-term moisture changes from the prairie below since 1850, NOT from an increase in temeprature since 1950. )

RR Kampen said: “The cause of this has been identified too, and has proved to be actually very simple.”

It is a simple message, to appeal to the simple minded. But the overall physics of radiative forcings and feedbacks is anything but simple. If it were, there would be no debate. That you believe this topic is “simple” tells me you do not understand it.

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O, but I do. The physics of radiative forcings and (general) feedbacks is fantastically complex. These are also measurable. All by all it’s clear the radiative forcings and feedbacks have, until now, a net result of not very much. So temperature rise and [CO2]-rise do end up showing a simple relation, although modified a bit by ‘weather’ en stuff like the solar cycle, volcanoes, EN/SO. General rule: [CO2] up, global temperature up. Most of the problem has been solved.

So you give a link showing temp and [CO2] on top of the Mauna Loa and call that ‘the real world’ or the globe? You have to show that global temperature isn’t changing and then (only then) you have to explain why the vast majority of glaciers are dissappearing – or why I can’t skate in winters in Holland anymore. Esoterical explanations like ‘mother Nature’ will not do.

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Re: RACookPE1978 (05:31:09) :

“Antarctic ice extents are increasing, no decreasing.”

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There a two connected hypotheses on GW: higher temperature, more precipitation.
If the temperature rises by ten degrees Celsius, that is vast global warming.
If it rises from -5° C to +5° C, ice will just melt.
If it rises from -15° C to -5° C, snow will accumulate and ice will increase.

Now warming around the Antarctic is just about a degree or so, but apparently increased snow cover on the sea-ice there is preventing it from melting a bit.
Extent there, by the way, is now close to normal and might drop below in a couple of days – but that’s just ‘weather’.

You stated: “Now warming around the Antarctic is just about a degree or so…” Wrong. Antarctica is cooling, not warming: click1, click2, click3, click4.

Next, RACookPE1978 (05:31:09) is exactly right when he says that Antarctic ice extents are increasing, not decreasing: click1, click2, click3. I will ignore your “vast global warming” comment, as the planet has been cooling for most of the past decade, despite increases in CO2.

However, in the same comment that you criticize my link because it is specific to Mauna Loa, which is true, you comment that you can’t skate specifically in Holland any more. I suggest that you not trade in your ice skates for roller skates just yet: click. You say that “You have to show that global temperature isn’t changing.” Wrong. Global temperature is always changing. But despite constant fluctuations, notice that the planet’s global temperature is about where it was 30 years ago: click.

The planet’s temperature is always fluctuating around a gradually rising trend line going back to the Little Ice Age. This is normal and entirely natural. What is happening does not need the superfluous entities of AGW or CO2 to explain the climate.

Finally, glaciers are one of the very easiest things to cherry pick in the entire world. There are more than 160,000 glaciers world wide. Retreating glaciers can always be found — and advancing glaciers can always be found. It is true that since the LIA many glaciers are retreating. But that is due entirely to natural climate fluctuations, not to CO2. The most important factor in glacier advance and retreat is precipitation [snow] at higher altitudes.

As climatologist Dr Roy Spencer says, “No one has falsified the hypothesis that the observed temperatures changes are a consequence of natural variability.” Do you understand what that means?

That hypothesis must be falsified in order for the CO2=AGW conjecture to succeed. Alarmists always get the Scientific Method backward. I could invent a hypothesis that there is a CO2 monster living under my bed that causes global warming. Do scientists have to refute my hypothesis? No. I have to show, through solid evidence and replicatable experiments that the monster is in fact there. Until/unless I do so, the CO2 monster hypothesis is just one of many hypotheses that come and go.

To be valid, the CO2=AGW hypothesis must withstand scrutiny, which requires that all data and methodologies must be made available and transparent. It must be testable, falsifiable, and capable of making valid predictions. As we see, it is a failed hypothesis. Data and methodologies claiming to verify the hypothesis are kept secret, therefore the AGW hypothesis can not be independently tested, verified or falsified.

The shenanigans in the Yamal caper are typical of the alarmist method. And no one has been able to falsify the long accepted theory that temperature fluctuations are due to natural climate variability. You can see what’s happening here: click.